Daily News from New York, New York • 52

SUNDAY NEWS. OCTOBER 16, 1960 20c OIL i. i. si--- WIIIIIS frig if Jall -tfg-w-gg- J- 'rtarnriiiis'i ivft it '-z I r.f 5 I. i v.

i f. i. I i rl I 1 -r-r v- 1- 'll I 'it x1 JtCV. it 1. if MiU I i i I i i 3 jr i i 1 i 1 fr-: -X Cficngi'ng Stations Model ikowi how Grand Central Terminal will look when lopped by new 59-atery skyscraper.

When the first depot was huilt (above, right) 42d St. was considered the outskirts of town. In 1920 (right) it had an off-shoot spur from the Third At. elevated on its doorstep. By HENRY LEE "jl TORE than any other spot in town, the squat pile 11 A of flamboyant French architecture at 89 E.

42d St. offers every facility to eat, drink, work, play, see movies, follow the market, buy oysters, whisky, books or candy, have one's portrait painted and otherwise lead a full and happy life without passing thought to the predictions of U. S. weatherman Ernest J. Christie.

Thus hampered neither by rain nor snow nor sleet nor gloom of night, some 530,000 people swiftly cross a weatherless acre of Tennessee marble pavement each day, scurry up and down Botticini marble staircases and pick their wav through arcades and corridors that take them Under its original copper roof, 65,156,063 passengers were handled in 1946, the vintage year they still talk about in railroading, and more than a quarter of a million have been accommodated in just one day. The main building (712 feet long, 395 feet wide and 160 feet high) can take in 30,000 pertons, and you could put City Hall in the main concourse, with prob' ably a little room left over for picketing demonstration. Even the clock is the biggest indoor timepiece in the world with 15' inch numerals and a minute hand almost 7V feet long. But, mostly. Grand Central is the stuff of legend and drama.

It has been memorialized in a book Central," by David Marshall, Whittlesey House, 1946) and a long-popular, though misnamed radio program. Grand Central Station (not Terminal). "RAND Central stands at 89 E. 42d because, in Commodore Vanderbilt's day, Manhat-tanites looked on trains much as. people in Queens and Newark look on airports today.

The locomotives were noisy, smoky and sometimes blew up. So, eventually, the steam contraptions were barred from Fourth Ave. below 42d, and the commodore had to build up among shacks, groggeries and cow pastures. "The End-of-the-World Station," newspapers hooted, and the day it opened, Oct. 9, 1871, they almost ignored the event because of storipm imhittprincr course, are as duly constituted under state supervision as any municipal force.

Emergency hospital facilities, two doctors and two nurses being on duty daily (temporarily in a club car parked on Track 15 while the construction is going on). However, Grand Central cannot lay claim to Grand Central Hospital, an entirely separate institution of healing located further east on 42d. Thrice-weekly public worship, each Monday, Wednesday and Friday nMn, in an unlit coach on Track 13. Religious services are conducted by "The Bishop of Grand Central Redcap No. 42 Ralston Young.

"Sunday to Sunday is a long gap between remembering the Lord," explains layman Young, and congregations of up to 40, including executives, passers-by and derelicts, agree with him. Music director and organist, probably the only public musician west of the Iron Curtain who, under no circumstances, is permitted to play "The Star-Spangled Banner." Night after Pearl Harbor, Mary Lee Read played it during rush hour and everybody in the main concourse came to attention, missing trains by the dozen. Grand Central Moffo fi THINK Very Big In all, manager Stephen T. Keiley directs 2,035 terminal employes, and whether you look up, down or sidewise, everything about the operation meets the American challenge of superlatives. i'f i 'j I rible fire in Chicago.

But you couldn't deny Vanderbilt thought big. Largest room in the country, some 530 feet or longer and 200 feet wide, his train shed accommodated the three separate stations of the old New York New Haven, the Harlem and the Central-Hudson railroads. (To get from one station to another, passengers had to walk out into the street) Trains Coasted Down To Waiting Engintt And the shed was as surprisingly clean as it was big, because the commodore didn't allow locomotives inside to smoke it up. Departing trains stood engine-less on a downgrade; when the brakes were released, they coasted to the waiting engine. Arrivals were more adventure' some.

Incoming locomotives, un-coupled while the train was still in motion, sped ahead into an open-switch siding, which was hastily closed behind them. The decapitated train coasted straight into the train shed and was hand-braked to a halt. Though later banned from railroading, this delicate and hair-raising maneuver known a "switching on the fly" never caused an accident at the depot. However, it was an accident, and a bad one, on Jan. 22, 1902, that precipitated the building of the present Grand Central only a year after a $5,000,000 refurbishing had been completed.

A New Haven train, halted for aTpd signal in the smoky. Park reared 775 feet on columned pairs of steel cylinders 13 inches thick encased in fireproof concrete. The columns sit on huge, anti-vibration "sandwiches" of lead, steel and asbestos that, in turn, rest on steel-concrete platforms, 18 feet leng, 4 feet wide and 14 inches thick. These, in further turn, lie on the bedrock 17 feet below the lowest track level. it's a tight squeeze, the column taking up all but inches of tkt 26-inck clearance required by the railroad, and there it the added complication of razing the six-story Grand Central Terminal Building.

But once again, they eay, there wilt be no interference wth trackt, train eervice or traveling man. And, except for oversized electronic stairways connecting with the new building, Grand Central Terminal will remain practically unchanged: still the place where lovers meet, commuters curse, where some 500 trains are handled daily and they still roll out the red carpet each night for the departure of the 20th Century Limited. Actually, Grand Central is unchangeable, a self-sufficient city-within-a-city of some 43 acres including its subsidiaries, which boasts its own: Fire-inspection teams and 37-man police under Chief Robert W. Stone. The special policemen, takr an FBl-Ilkt training to some 13 surrounding buildings.

Not to prolong; this word tease, 83 E. 424 is Grand Central Terminal, a subterranean landmark f-r a century and the third railroad station on the lite since Commodore Vanderbilt competed his first Grand Central D-pot, a five-towered thing of awkward beauty in its own Victorian way, back in 1871. YVa Cemmafer Problem Was New At the turn of the century, be-eauie of a then-new problem commuter the commodore's pride was redone at a cost of $5,000,000. Only a year or so later, they began tearing the whole thing down over the travelers' heads, and after 10 years of destruction, construction, blasting and track-laying, without losing an Arrival, Departure or passenger, the present terminal was opened on Feb. 2, 1913.

tAey're at it again! Commuters picking their way between tracks 102 to 115, lower level, and tracks 20 to 36, upper level, see cabalistic yellow marks chalked here and there and hel-metfd construction men mingling with the conductors. All about them, a cellar-less, 53-story building, -largest office building in. the world," is being over th telegraph about i tiM.